Terry Marotta: The kids’ hard questions

Monday

You’re in tricky waters when you talk to young children. You often don’t know WHAT they’ll ask or how you should answer.

You’re in tricky waters when you talk to young children. You often don’t know WHAT they’ll ask or how you should answer.

My spouse was away last weekend, as was the spouse of our daughter. Thus, I invited her to bring the two little ones for a sleepover here, and a fine and cozy time we had, too, especially when the sun went down and all sweet-smelling from the bath and cocooned in their footed pjs, they curled up with us to study the coming darkness.

There weren’t any hard questions then.

The hard questions came the following day, when in a burst of inter-generational fervor, I staged an outing by a pond that included not just the one in her 50s and the one in her 30s, not just the child, 4, and the baby, 1,, but also our “elder statesmen” of a great-uncle just entering his 89th year.

Moving about is almost impossible for Uncle Ed now, so my daughter stayed at water’s edge with him while I took the children for a walk.

That’s when the fellow who is 4 began with his questions.

He saw a carved sculpture of a Native American, and a dark shadow crossed his face.

“What happened to all the OTHER Indians?” he wanted to know.

I had been present a month ago when he saw Disney’s “Pocahontas” and dissolved into tears as the guns came out and the braves started dying.

“Were the Indians shot in real life?” he had asked his aunt then with troubled expression.

“No,” she told him, pretty troubled herself. “But some got sick because they had never been exposed to the germs the Pilgrims brought here. It’s like with daycare when you first start going.”

And now, on the hill above this pond he was turning to me.

“But where are the Indians TODAY?” he asked, and I was just framing an answer to that one when our walk brought us to a large veteran’s memorial and he began asking about war.

Pained by the turn the conversation was taking, I reached back seven decades to the “Good War,” mentioning the bad man Hitler and pointing to the triumph of good.

“But how many died?” he pressed me.

I was not about to say 70 million, which is the figure now generally agreed upon, so I said I wasn’t sure.

“I think only ONE person died and he’s here in this grave,” he said, indicating the granite monument his baby brother was trying vainly to scale.

“But listen to this!” I broke in. “You actually KNOW somebody who was in that war, and he’s sitting mum right now! He was gone for three-and-a-half years during it, in a really hot place with mosquitoes where you could never have a bath, ever, and the whole time he wrote poems and songs and funny stories that he sent back to the newspaper. So not only did he NOT die, but he’s almost 90, like you little guys will get to be one day. Because really life is long and full of adventure.”

He paused and looked up at me.

“Funny stories?” he said as I stooped to hoist his baby brother onto my hip.

“Tell some of those stories,” he said and took my hand as his wee brother patted my face, and together we made our way back down the trail.